


We Don't Talk About It

by excapricious



Series: Just Let Me Know (I'll Be At the Door) [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF
Genre: A lil fluff, Angst, Crying, Fighting, Friends With Benefits, Friendship, Love, M/M, Mentions of Sex, Sleep, baths, complicated adult emotions, its a bit of a mess, lots of confusing feelings, mentions of drinking, mentions of drug use, messy relationship, sads, there isn't really a plot im sorry !
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 15:43:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11626689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/excapricious/pseuds/excapricious
Summary: "Do you think we're meant to be?""No."





	We Don't Talk About It

**Author's Note:**

> This is a follow up to my fic Give Me Some Morphine, so give that a read first! Comments and kudos are always appreciated, thank you!

Rafael wakes up in the middle of the night with moonlight streaking across the bed, falling on the face of a sleeping Daveed next to him. Daveed’s mouth is open, just slightly, and his breathing is loud but not quite a snore. Rafael has a thought stuck in the back of his head, the thought that woke him up, and he taps Daveed’s forehead until he wakes. He's tired and disoriented, blinking at Rafael, who's leaning on an elbow above him. 

“Diggs.” Rafa says, his voice sleepy and hoarse. “Do you think we're meant to be?” Daveed, bless him, doesn't question why Rafael woke him up at three in the morning to ask him a worn out, cliched question that's never arisen before. Instead, he chews at his bottom lip thoughtfully as he rubs sleep from his eyes. 

“No.” He answers finally, sounding apologetic. “I don't.” Rafael sinks onto his back again, staring up at the popcorn ceiling. He's not exactly sad, just further resigned to what he already mostly knew. 

“Yeah.” Rafael responds, voice soft. When he rolls to his side to see if Daveed heard, he finds him asleep again, one arm tossed over his head. Lips parted like he's about to clamp them over a straw. Rafael sighs and scoots closer into the warm side of the man who isn't his soulmate, who isn't anything but his best friend who needs him sometimes. Rafael is happy to let him. 

___

“Rafa.” Daveed wakes him the way he always does, tugging back the blankets so the cold air leeches the warmth from Rafael’s bare skin, sending him shivering upright for coffee. Rafael’s hands scrabble for the white hotel blankets, too many thin ones piled over devil-soft sheets. Daveed keeps them held securely in his knuckle-knobbed hands, smiling at Rafael as he sits up, grumbling, and wipes the night off his face. 

“Daveed.” Rafael yawns, pushes falling-loose hair out of his face. Daveed is wearing his glasses, the ones with the heavy black frames that Rafael thinks make him look like a social studies teacher. He's holding some kind of pastry in one hand, and he looks too bright-eyes and bushy-tailed for the wee hours of the morning. 

“It's eleven, fuckwad.” It's like Daveed can hear Rafael’s thoughts. It makes him smile. “Get out of bed.” Rafael flops back down into the pillows, laughing. 

“Let me guess, you've already been on a run and showered?” Rafael props an arm under his head, watching Daveed eat what looks like a slice of quiche as he sits on the foot of the bed.

“Yeah, man, and I found a bakery.” Daveed is grinning, raising the quiche in the air like he's toasting someone. 

“Is there more of that?” Rafael is starving suddenly. Daveed tosses the paper bakery bag at him, and Rafael barely manages to catch it before it hits him in the chest. Daveed laughs at him, popping the crust of the pastry in his mouth. Rafael watches him while he eats, feeling his chest bloom at the feeling of having somebody there. 

___

“Lin.”

“Rafael! Man, are you feeling better?” 

“I'm fine, but Daveed is swimming laps at the hotel pool and I'm in the room, just, like, flipping the fuck out. Fuck.” Rafael hears Lin gasp through the phone. 

“Daveed's at the hotel?”

“Yeah, he showed up yesterday morning.”

“Shit. Anthony said he left without telling anyone, and he hasn't been answering his phone. Is he good? Is… everything good?”

“I slept with him.” Rafael is laying on the couch with an arm draped over his burning face. 

“Oh. Oh!” Lin lets out a breath. “Oh. Wow. When?”

“Um. Yesterday. And last night.” Rafael wants to move to Alaska. Lin is only a handful of years older than him, but he's married. He has a kid. And this is practically as bad as talking to his dad about his sex life.

“Well. Was it weird this morning?” Rafael lets an enormous sigh out through his nose. 

“No! No, he woke me up and we ate fucking quiche, and it wasn't weird, but that's why it's so weird. You know?”

“Yeah, I know. So, are you gonna talk to him about it?”

“I don't know, shit.” Rafael groans. “Oh, and.” He hears Lin laugh a little. 

“What now?”

“Last night I asked him- god, I can't even repeat it. It's so embarrassing. Fuck me.”

“Sounds like he did.”

“Lin, if you don't shut the fuck up.”

“Just tell me what you said, it can't be that bad.”

“It's bad.”

“Well, did he freak out?”

“No… no.”

“See, it's fine. It's Diggs. You're fine.”

“I fucking asked him if he thought we were meant to be.” Rafael presses a throw pillow over his face, swearing into it. 

“Wow. Okay.” Lin goes muffled and Rafael knows he's covered the phone speaker to laugh. He's probably telling Vanessa. Fuck. “Listen Rafa. It's not that bad. He didn't seem to think it was that bad.”

“Are you kidding? I acted like a fucking virgin girl, spilling my heart to him after I got fucked.”

“Rafael Casal, emotions aren't a strictly female phenomenon. And virginity is a social construct.”

“Fuck. I know. I'm sorry.” Lin laughs a little. 

“It's alright, you're suffering. Well, what did he say?”

“He said he didn't think we were.” It hurts more now, in the daylight. Hurts more to say it aloud. 

“Oh, shit. I'm sorry, Rafael.”

“I'm alright, y’know. I knew that was the truth.”

“But it's hard to hear it.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” It always strikes Rafael how understanding Lin is. How he always says the right thing.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. I'll be okay.”

“He cares about you. A lot.”

“I know.”

“Alright, but… you've slept with him before, yeah?” His voice is mischievous, and Rafael guffaws. 

“You're such a fucking gossip, Lin.”

“But that's true?”

“Shut up.”

___

Daveed comes back with his chlorine-soaked hair dropping onto the brown carpeting, goggle-prints ringing his eyes and making Rafael laugh. He's watching TV on the couch, a cooking show that's making him hungry and angry, yelling at the television as the contestants race to plate their fussy-sounding meals. For a moment he thinks Daveed might walk over, maybe place a kiss on the top of his head. A sitcom “honey, I’m home” moment. But Rafael’s life doesn't contain those moments, and Daveed heads for the bathroom. Rafael listens to the muffled spray of the shower and chews his lip, wishing he could go back to last night, back to when he was being held and touched and cared for under the safety of the bedsheets. 

He must fall asleep because then Daveed is shaking him until he comes to, the show on TV muted. 

“We should get dinner, Rafa.” If it wasn't weird before, it is now. And Rafael recognizes this, the hours after the morning’s glow fades and they're just two boys in a hotel room who are avoiding each other’s eyes because they've already seen too much. It'll pass, it always does. And the night will become another memory that Rafael puts away in a drawer somewhere, a blurred snapshot of a make-believe life. 

“Yeah.” Rafael responds, his voice faint. All he's eaten today was that quiche and a handful of almonds from the container that Daveed (inexplicably) has sitting on the counter. Daveed worries about things like that, about nutrition and hydration and sleep. Sometimes, when Rafael spends enough time around him, he begins to feel like someone who might be able to care about those things too. 

“There's a restaurant down the street. Recommend on Yelp.” Daveed scratches the back of his neck, looking over Rafael’s head at a shitty piece of hotel art that hangs on the wall behind him. 

“Cool, okay, cool.” There's always the panic moment that Rafael will never get his best friend back. But then they sleep, in their own beds, and it's fixed in the morning with Daveed making the coffee too weak because he thinks it'll destroy Rafael’s stomach, and Rafael stealing shirts out of Daveed’s closet and insisting that he wears them better. It passes, and then they do it again. 

Rafael gets off the couch, feeling old and stiff and exhausted despite barely being awake six hours. Daveed gnaws at his lip as Rafael finds his shoes, Chucks that are falling apart at the seams. Daveed gets after him for that, tells him he has more than enough income now for a decent pair of new shoes. They aren't in their early twenties anymore, barely getting by in a too-small apartment rental, he says. But these shoes are important to Rafael- one night, when they were drunk and younger than today, Daveed scrawled on the bottom of one with a thick black Sharpie: “If found, return to Best Friend Daveed D. Diggs.” Rafael had been laughing as Daveed wrote it, holding his foot in his lap. 

“What's that for, Diggs?” He'd asked between weak-knee giggles, a bottle of vodka between his thighs. 

“In case I lose your fucking drunk ass!” Daveed had crowed as he added a scribbled heart below the writing. 

So Rafael is keeping these shoes. They're important, and he's sentimental as much as he's loathe to admit it. 

The restaurant is a block away from the hotel, and Daveed’s flip-flops clap on the pavement as they walk. The air is warm and full of stuffy breezes that wreak havoc on Rafael’s coiffed-up hair. Daveed is talking about tour dates, about going back to New York for TV opportunities, but all Rafael hears is gone, gone, gone. He wants to say “please don't leave again.” Instead he nods at the appropriate places and busies himself with watching the concrete under his feet. 

They sit outside at a small wooden two-top just off the sidewalk. The waitress pours tall glasses of water and smiles at Daveed, her eyes melting. Rafael feels a misplaced lick of jealousy, something that doesn't belong in his chest, and studies the menu until she leaves. 

“Rafa?” Daveed asks, voice hesitant. He looks up, into Daveed’s chocolate-concerned eyes. 

“Yeah?” He doesn't want Daveed to ask him if he's okay. 

“Are you okay?” 

“Yeah.” He delivers it with a smile, but he's so tired. 

Daveed orders a salad, which Rafael expects, and it's comforting that so little has changed from the first day they met. Nothing, but everything, has shifted. Rafael gets a pasta, one with sausage and cheese and red sauce, because maybe a hot meal will stick in his ribs and diminish the emptiness inside him. 

He wasn't empty last night, in any sense of the feeling. Daveed pulled his hair and he'd never felt righter, more fully in his skin. Rafael has a theory that he needs to be used, needs to be put in his place in order to stay sane. If he's left to his own devices for too long, making his own decisions, he spirals out on it and loses his mind. He doesn't know how to explain it, just that Daveed can always fix it when he growls and pins Rafael's hands down. 

“Rafael, can we… talk? About the party at Anthony’s? And about yesterday?”

Rafa doesn't want to talk about yesterday. He wants it to stay pristine, untouched in his mind, from the first moment that Daveed spilled in the door and ran his mouth and held Rafael close. He doesn't want to mar the memories that are for them and them alone, couldn't bear for the people sitting at tables around them to hear what's so close to him. 

“What's there to talk about?” Rafael picks at a loose thread on the white fabric napkin. 

“Well, maybe how I cut myself off from you then came running back to your hotel and,” his voice drops to a whisper, “slept with you?” 

“We don't have to discuss that. It's not any different from the other times.”

“No, but it is, Rafa.” Daveed’s eyes are pleading. “Because I hurt you. At the party, I hurt you.”

“You apologized, so it's fine.” Rafael feels like he's been coated in cement, heavy and tied down. 

“I shouldn't expect fucking you to fix it. Especially because you're clearly still upset.” Sometimes Rafael can't stand Daveed, when he insists on picking things apart under a magnifying lens. 

“Well, this conversation sure as hell isn’t going to fix it.” Rafael is bristling now, throwing up walls without knowing why. He sees that he's doing it and can't stop. Daveed’s forehead creases. 

“I'm sorry.” He whispers. Rafael is an asshole. He knows it, Daveed knows it, the whole world knows it. He isn't good enough for Daveed, and maybe that's why they'll never be anything more than friends who fuck when the sadness is too thick. 

___

“Why are we fighting?” Daveed asks him back in the hotel room. He looks desperate and Rafael knows he wants answers and data and a black and white sense of how and what and why. That's the way Daveed is, but Rafael can't supply him with any of that, can't think of anything to say in response but “because”. Because he's still hurt, and because they had sex and now things are stupid and weird between them, because the waitress flirted with Daveed, because he insisted on talking it all through like a goddamn functioning human. Because. So Rafa doesn't say anything as he retreats to the bedroom, feeling Daveed’s eyes on his back. 

Rafael knows that he's acting petulant and petty, that he isn't being an adult, that he isn't being a friend. He can't bring himself to care. He's so goddamn tired of caring. He's so tired of the feeling that's been gnawing at him all day, that he's thirty and alone and still having friends-with-benefits sex that he can't get over the next morning. He can't silence the thought that he wants more, desperately. That a sliver of him wants a house on the water in California, big enough for a person who loves him, and a dog, and maybe even kids one day. 

He can't tell Daveed that he's just fucking sad, okay? So he doesn't tell him anything.

Rafael runs a bath in the bedroom’s en-suite, as deep as it can go without flooding into the overflow drain. He turns the hot water on full blast, ignoring the heat still rising off the sidewalk outside. There are Jacuzzi jets lining the tub walls, and he turns them on and stares at the churning bubbles for a long moment before he gets in. 

The water is burning hot on his skin as he sinks in, inch by inch, making him grit his teeth until he adjusts into the heat that's already making him sweat. He lays back, head on the cold ceramic rim of the tub, and closes his eyes. He wonders what Daveed is doing on the other side of the bathroom door. Watching TV? Calling Oak? Booking a flight to New York for the next morning?

Part of Rafael wants to call for Daveed, have him come in, sit on the tiled floor, wash Rafael’s hair. He'd done that once before, eight or nine years ago, when Rafael was tripping on shrooms something awful, wracked with sweaty chills and nausea that sent him vomiting into a trash can in Daveed’s arms. They haven't talked about that since, but Rafael still remembers Daveed’s fingers in his hair, washing out dirt and puke while rapping softly to ground him. Daveed always was the only one who ever could. Ground him, that is. Bring him back down to Earth when he's spiraling away. Rafael is spiraling now. 

He remembers learning that Daveed got cast in a musical. He remembers him coming over with a bottle of tequila so they could celebrate while smoking weed on Rafael’s balcony and listening to a shitty Spotify playlist that neither of them could be bothered to turn off. He remembers when he finally realized what a big deal it really was, when he took Daveed to the airport and watched his plane leave through the big glass windows. When he finally realized he really was leaving for the other side of the country. 

He remembers it blowing up. Almost overnight, it seemed. He remembers seeing Daveed’s face everywhere suddenly, remembers a Skype call where Daveed had to hang up to speak to someone about putting him on the goddamn Today show. 

He remembers flying to New York to see Daveed, remembers hollering in the audience as his best friend strutted onstage in magenta. He remembers realizing that Daveed is the one who made it out. 

He remembers the small stuff too. A Getback show at some tiny venue in California, Daveed buzzing Rafael’s hair in the back room minutes before they were set to go on. He remembers the electricity of that crowd as Daveed echoed his lines in his raps and bounced onstage next to him. He remembers a red-eye flight back to the Bay after a recording session, sharing the peanuts and headphones as they watched Die Hard on Daveed’s tablet. He remembers the very first time he brought Daveed over to his house, how they ate his mom's honey-barbecue ribs and bummed around on the back porch, messing with rhymes and beats and chord progressions. 

He remembers waking up the morning after they slept together the first time. 

He remembers Daveed yelling that he doesn't love him. 

He remembers hot tears leaking from his eyes and down his chin in the too-full, too-warm  
Jacuzzi bathtub as Daveed exists in the next room. 

Rafael buries his wet face in his wet hands and cries, cries for the memories and the time and the history and the missing and the fights. Cries for his best friend, because, god, he misses him. 

Daveed knocks on the door while Rafael is sniffling in the bath, doing his best to keep quiet, keep still, push it down until it passes. He tenses when he hears the knock, another torrent of tears flooding his eyes.  


“Rafa? Can you come out and talk to me?” He's so fucking insistent, so stubborn. Rafael heaves a sob, crying for reasons that he can no longer place. 

“Rafa- Rafael? Are you crying?” Daveed sounds dumbstruck, knocking growing louder. Rafael can only shake and heave in the tub, knees drawn up to his chest that's obscured by the racing jet bubbles. “Rafael Casal. Can I come in?” Daveed sounds so concerned, and Rafael can imagine him on the other side of the door with his ear pressed to the wood, brows bunched up towards his hairline. Another sob. 

“I'm coming in there, Rafa.” And the door is creaking open, Daveed’s head poking through. His eyes fall on shivering, sniveling Rafael and go soft, impossibly caring. And it isn't weird that Daveed is seeing him in the bathtub, which only sends another cry bubbling to the surface. They're so close. They've always been so close. 

“Hey. Hey, Casal, hey.” Daveed’s voice is built to soothe, quiet and rich as he sinks cross-legged to the tile next to the tub. Rafael wipes the snot from his upper lip, shoulders shaking as he cracks again from the show of care. “Talk to me, yeah? What's wrong?”

“I don't- know.” He blubbers, indecipherable. Daveed, brows bunched like Rafael knew they'd be, reaches a hand out to him, settles it on his shoulder. 

“It's okay, Cash. It'll be okay.” 

“What if,” (a sob tears through Rafael, inhuman when it comes out of his throat. Now he feels like he's crying for the sake of crying, crying for the twenty odd years of tears that he kept boxed up inside) “it's- not?” He looks at Daveed through tear-blurred eyes. 

“I think it will be.” Daveed always sounds like he's reciting poetry, no matter what he says. It's makes Rafael cry because everything, everything is making him cry right here right now. Daveed’s hand is rubbing slow and gentle over the wet skin of Rafael’s shoulder, his eyes cradling him. 

Rafael doesn't tell Daveed “you can't know that”, because he thinks he does. Out of the whole universe of people, Daveed is the one who can read the stars for the future and he says that it will be okay. 

“Can you kiss me?” Rafael asks without thinking about it, salt itching where it dries on his face. Daveed doesn't ask questions, he doesn't shy away. He wipes Rafael’s face with a wet washcloth, wipes the tears and the years off of his skin, and leans in. 

Rafael kisses him like it's the only thing keeping him afloat. Daveed doesn't pull back until he does. His mouth is warm and he tastes like pepper and cinnamon gum, mouthing at Rafael with muscle-memory softness.

Rafael isn't crying when they break apart, Daveed’s hand still on his shoulder. He's so tired, mouth tingling like cinnamon. He's so worn and blown apart and drained, the afterglow of his sobs making his head feel tunneled out and disinfected with bleach. Daveed pulls him from the tub, dries his skin with a white hotel towel and helps him into the plush, ridiculous robe that's still laying on the floor from the last time he used it. Rafael falls against him, feet betraying him. 

Daveed gets Rafael into bed, despite the sun that's still seeping through the windows before he pulls the blackout drapes. He tugs the sheets to Rafael’s chin and gives him a loaded look that Rafael is too fuzzy to read. He catches Daveed’s hand as he steps away, begging him with his eyes. 

“Rafael. I can't have sex with you right now.” Rafa is too bone-deep exhausted to argue, nurses the blow inside himself. 

“Then lay with me. Please. At least that.” His voice is husky, post-crying rough. Daveed looks at him for a moment and climbs into the bed next to him. He's warm and Rafael backs into him to feel it and almost manages to convince himself, by the time he's falling asleep, that it's enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this mess!


End file.
